The Seventies - Dominic Sandbrook
A decade that started well, but quickly went to wrack & ruin
What did you do in the 70s?
- Get married and have kids?
- Move into your first home?
- Join the world of work?
- Take your first foreign holiday?
- Try to change the world?
- Try to find yourself?
Maybe you were falling in love with music, or just falling in love. Perhaps you were sitting exams and getting serious, or just mucking around with your pals in the playground. Perhaps, like me you were just being born. Or maybe you weren't even born at all.
Whatever you got up to in the 1970s, it has passed from Rose-Tinted memories into our shared national history. In many ways, 70s Britain feels like a very strange and distant place. But it's time to look again at the years of Ted Heath, Marc Bolan and Mary Whitehouse. Because this was the decade in which 21st-century Britain, our Britain, was born.
We often think that the 1960s give us freedom and the 1980s give us money. But, for most people, it was in the 1970s that those two thrills really arrived. And these were years of tremendous change, shattering the cosy post-war consensus. And, for millions of ordinary families, a brave new world, at once exciting and terrifying, was at hand.
